A group of University of Colorado at Boulder physics department faculty and students involved in the Large Hadron Collider project are celebrating the restart of the world's brawniest particle accelerator near Geneva over the weekend.
A faulty electrical connection between two of the accelerator's magnets only nine days after the project's original launch on Sept. 10, 2008, halted the project for 14 months of investigation and repair. Physicists have now resumed low-intensity particle circulation and hope to transition into full operational capacity in 2010 if the re-launch continues to go smoothly.
The Large Hadron Collider project, or LHC, sends protons and charged atoms whizzing around a 17-mile underground loop located on the border of France and Switzerland at 11,000 times per second -- nearly the speed of light. Located at the European Organization for Nuclear Research facility known as CERN, the collider will smash particles together at energy levels seven times higher than the previous record by such accelerators.
The scientists will use the LHC to attempt to recreate conditions immediately following the Big Bang, searching for answers about mysterious dark matter, dark energy, gravity and the fundamental laws of physics. The experiments may even shed light on the possibility that other dimensions exist, according to physicists.
CU-Boulder physics department faculty involved in the project include John Cumalat, Bill Ford, Uriel Nauenberg, Jim Smith, Kevin Stenson and Steve Wagner, as well as several postdoctoral researchers, graduate students and technical staff.
Sixteen years in the making, the $3.8 billion LHC project involves an estimated 10,000 people from 60 countries, including more than 1,700 scientists, engineers, students and technicians from 94 American universities and laboratories supported by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science and the National Science Foundation. The United States is providing about $530 million, primarily for the LHC detectors.
The CU-Boulder researchers have been working on the Compact Muon Solenoid, or CMS, one of two massive particle detectors in the collider and which weighs more than 12,500 tons. The amount of steel used in the magnetic yoke of the CMS is equivalent to the amount of steel used to build the Eiffel Tower, Cumalat said.
The CU-Boulder team has been working with the CMS "forward pixel detectors," which Cumalat called "the eyes of the device." The forward pixel detectors will help researchers measure the direction and momentum of subatomic particles following collisions as they penetrate roughly 25 million different silicon elements, providing clues to their origin and physical structure, he said.
One target of scientists is to find evidence of the "Higgs boson," a theoretical elementary particle that has been predicted by physicists and which is believed to hold clues to the mass of matter, said Cumalat. A single second of data acquisition by CMS will be equal to the data volume of 10,000 Encyclopedia Britannica sets.
For more information visit and the CU-Boulder High Energy Physics group Web site at /.
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